Microsoft is taking on Amazon in the cloud game. Citing a blog post issued by the software firm, VentureBeat reported that Microsoft will be bringing down its prices for some of the same kinds of storage services offered by Amazon Web Services. Last week, AWS reduced its prices and Microsoft said today that it will be slashing down its prices below that of AWS.
In the blog post, Steven Martin said, "We're also making the new prices effective worldwide, which means that Azure storage will be less expensive than AWS in many regions." Martin is the General Manager of Business Planning and Strategy for Windows Azure, the software giant's public cloud.
The price reductions will be effective on March 13 and will cover Azure's Block Bobs Storage as well as its Locally Redundant Disks/Page Blobs Storage. The company is also cutting in half the prices for transactions done to and from all the storage services of Azure.
Reducing prices to chip away at rivals or at the least to remain competitive is a classic strategy. Although Amazon is one of the companies that have become well-known for price reductions, other firms like Rackspace, Google and IBM have also employed it, the report said.
Last year, Microsoft committed to keep the prices for its most basic cloud computing services at around the same level as Amazon's, the report said.
Microsoft might be able to zoom ahead slightly with this price reduction. However, Amazon will still continue to become the leader of the public cloud space in the near future. By differentiating products and features instead of just slashing prices will help in making Azure more robust, the report said.
Microsoft is already experimenting with other approaches, like allowing customers to put bids for cloud workloads depending on their performance needs. Even its research team has already submitted a patent application that runs in these lines. However, Microsoft has not given word about its implementation, the report said.
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